Q: What’s worse than listening to someone ranting hysterically about Donald Trump? A: Listening to Bret Easton Ellis ranting hysterically about people ranting about Trump.
I gave him a fair hearing, I really did. Some of what Ellis has to say in White, his first work of non-fiction, is not stupid. It’s true that teeth-gnashing over Trump’s presidency can seem alarmingly out of touch with the realities of modern America. I share his concern that aesthetics are increasingly, regrettably, being sidelined in favour of ideology. His film criticism is unfailingly lucid and intelligent. I wish there had been more of it.
Ellis is used to being pilloried for his tweets, podcasts and journalism. He is surely expecting his provocatively titled book to have an incendiary effect on many readers; millennials, for a start, whom he has famously labelled ‘Generation Wuss’ because of their ‘over-sensitivity, their sense of entitlement, their insistence that they were always right, despite sometimes overwhelming proof to the contrary’.
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